Russian billionaire is behind mansion that housed Harry and Meghan, leaked files show
It has been a global enigma for the final two years: Who actually owns the lavish Vancouver Island property the place Prince Harry and Meghan wintered in 2020 as they reportedly hashed out their plan to step again from official royal duties?
Is it the Russian-born billionaire who several media retailers linked to the property? Is it Canadian mining magnate Frank Giustra, as (erroneously) reported by the New York Publish’s Web page Six?
CBC and Radio-Canada discovered the reply, and it does certainly contain a Russian, however it wasn’t simple — it took a global leak of tax-haven knowledge, entry to an organization’s inside information and intense analysis. All that, consultants say, reveals as soon as once more simply how opaque Canada is in the case of belongings like actual property and who owns it.
“It is rather simple for criminals all over the world to be laundering their soiled cash in Canada and shopping for actual property,” mentioned Kevin Comeau, a lawyer and monetary transparency professional. “And we have now no approach of understanding who they’re or [the] capability to chase their cash. “
From B.C. to Caribbean to Channel Islands
There isn’t any suggestion of criminality surrounding the Mille Fleurs mansion in North Saanich, about 30 kilometres up island from Victoria. But it surely actually shields its proprietor properly.
For starters, in contrast to with most properties in B.C., you may’t discover it within the provincial land registry.
That is as a result of the mansion is not registered as a single property, however is a part of a stretch of oceanfront land on the Saanich Peninsula owned by a company known as the Towner Bay Nation Membership. Every home-owner on the land has shares within the nation membership comparable to their lot.
The membership’s information should not public. However CBC/Radio-Canada was in a position to assessment an inside spreadsheet that tracks membership house owners’ property tax. It lists a British Virgin Islands firm known as JEMC Administration because the proprietor of Mille Fleurs.
Company information within the British Virgin Islands do not disclose an organization’s shareholders. So the possession path would usually cease chilly right here, however for a stroke of luck: The Pandora Papers — the large cache of leaked tax-haven information obtained by the Washington-based Worldwide Consortium of Investigative Journalists, and shared with CBC/Radio-Canada — reveals that JEMC Administration is owned by one other firm, registered within the Bahamas, known as Orland Properties.
Orland, in flip, is owned by a belief known as the Andromeda Belief, fashioned underneath the legal guidelines of the Bailiwick of Jersey, a tiny tax haven off the coast of France. The trustee is an organization whose sole officer lives in Cyprus.
However whose cash is behind that?
The Andromeda connection
Two years in the past, as hypothesis about who was actually internet hosting Harry and Meghan hit fever pitch, a reputation that saved rising was billionaire enterprise capitalist Yuri Milner, arguably the highest-profile Russian-born investor in Silicon Valley.
Milner is reported to spend time with celebrities on a superyacht — a ship additionally known as Andromeda — and he is aware of Canadian music producer David Foster, whose spouse is aware of Meghan Markle from their faculty days.
Foster, a 16-time Grammy winner, even gave an interview to Britain’s Daily Mail about the mansion in 2020, the place he mentioned he is been buddies with the mansion proprietor for years. The music producer mentioned that, though Milner wasn’t the proprietor, he had helped Milner hire the home “about 5 – 6 years in the past… for a short while.”
Milner-run funding funds took early positions in Fb and Twitter earlier than these firms went public, stakes that generated mega income. However as journalists revealed in 2017, about half the capital for his agency’s investments in Twitter got here from VTB Financial institution, the No. 2 financial institution in Russia, which is majority-owned by the state.
“It is most likely one of many two banks that fund most related authorities officers and oligarchs,” mentioned Jamison Firestone, who practised enterprise regulation in Moscow for almost twenty years and has grow to be a number one determine within the international marketing campaign towards Russian state corruption. He known as VTB “a slush fund” for the Russian authorities.
Milner’s Fb play, in the meantime, was partly seeded with cash from an organization that had itself obtained a whole bunch of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in loans from a subsidiary of the Russian state vitality firm Gazprom, the same media investigation showed. An oligarch named Alisher Usmanov ran the Gazprom subsidiary and ultimately obtained a stake in Milner’s Fb funding.
Milner has mentioned he was simply doing enterprise, in search of funders and making investments. Whereas VTB Financial institution and Gazprom are underneath sanctions in Canada, the U.S. and the EU, that did not begin till 2014 — three years after he raised the cash.
A spokesperson for Milner instructed CBC that the VTB funding was paid again that 12 months, and that Milner has not raised capital from Russian buyers since 2011. Usmanov was solely added to Canada’s sanction checklist this March. Milner has by no means been sanctioned, and is not typically thought-about to be an oligarch.
Milner’s about-face
In early April, CBC requested Milner whether or not he immediately or not directly owns the property the place the royals spent Christmas and New 12 months’s in 2019-2020.
The reply got here from Alice McGillion of New York-based status administration agency Rubenstein: “We are able to formally affirm, as we have now persistently accomplished [in] the previous, that neither Yuri Milner nor any member of the family nor any entity affiliated with him or his household owns Mille Fleurs mansion on Vancouver Island or another property in Canada.” McGillion referred CBC to the interview given by music producer Foster.
Nevertheless, paperwork discovered by CBC Information within the Pandora Papers leak reveal that the Andromeda Belief — the Jersey-constituted entity atop the chain of offshore firms main all the way down to the Mille Fleurs property — did not all the time go by that title.
Till February 2016, it was known as the Yury Milner Belief (variations within the English spelling of Russian names are widespread).
A letter written by a lawyer for Milner in 2018, discovered within the leak, explains the belief’s origins: “The one that contributed the belongings,” it says, “was Yury Milner.”
The letter continues, “The potential beneficiaries of the Andromeda Belief embrace charities, kin and buddies of Yury Milner.”
One other report says that earlier than 2015, “Yury Milner exercised management over” a collection of firms together with JEMC Administration, which purchased the Mille Fleurs mansion.
CBC Information went again to Milner with these findings. The response this time was fairly completely different.
McGillion despatched one other assertion, asking that it’s attributed to an unnamed “belief spokesperson.”
The assertion admitted that Milner’s belief, funded by him, purchased the mansion in 2013. It acknowledged that, in actual fact, Milner himself was a beneficiary of the belief on the time. And it reiterated that Prince Harry and Meghan’s keep was organized by David Foster.
The assertion defined this all by saying, nevertheless, that Milner and his spouse determined in 2013 to pledge to offer away nearly all of their wealth to charity. The subsequent 12 months, Milner had himself eliminated as a beneficiary of the belief he’d created, in favour of newly fashioned charitable foundations that the assertion did not title. In 2018, all his kin had been additionally eliminated as potential beneficiaries, the assertion provides.
He’s due to this fact now not “affiliated with” the mansion, the assertion mentioned.
It additionally confirmed that Milner has the same belief association for the 107-metre superyacht Andromeda — a vessel he has till now denied proudly owning, however has a knack for being noticed partying and vacationing on. The assertion mentioned he’s not “affiliated” with the yacht, both.
Firestone, the previous Moscow lawyer, mentioned it is a authorized distinction with out a lot of a distinction.
“When you’ve got the unique use of one thing, you mainly have all the advantages of proudly owning it with out having to be legally proudly owning it,” he mentioned. “So sure, he will not be the proprietor, however he could very properly be the final word beneficiary, which is mainly the identical factor for all these things.”
WATCH | See the B.C. property the place Harry and Meghan stayed in 2020:
Mille Fleurs, a mansion in North Saanich, B.C., is believed to be the place Prince Harry and Meghan vacationed and the place the duchess is at present staying 0:35
‘We do not have the instruments proper now’
The thriller of the Vancouver Island mansion reveals how thorny it may be to seek out out who actually owns property in Canada, which might make it immensely troublesome to confront the scourge of cash laundering in Canadian actual property, or to confiscate the riches of Russian oligarchs, transparency professional Comeau mentioned.
“We do not have the instruments proper now as a way to be discovering, not to mention seizing, these belongings. You’ll be able to’t seize them till you determine them and join them again to these Russian oligarchs.”
In a Canadian first, B.C. enacted a public transparency database for property that is speculated to be absolutely operational in November.
In the meantime, the federal and provincial governments have been in discussions since 2019 on establishing registries to trace the actual house owners behind company entities like firms and partnerships. Justin Trudeau’s Liberals initially promised it by 2025, however amid the contemporary urgency of the unprecedented sanctions towards Russia and plenty of oligarchs, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland promised in her funds speech final week to bump that as much as 2023, at the very least for federally included firms.
Responding to a query from Radio-Canada final week, Freeland mentioned that whereas it will likely be troublesome to additionally get each province to comply with undertake what’s often called useful possession transparency for provincially registered companies, it’s “actually vital” for democracy and the financial system.
“My hope is that we’re in a second the place there’s a actual nationwide consensus,” she mentioned. “We have to know what cash is flowing into belongings in Canada.”
